There were a couple middle-aged Honduran women in the room contiguous to mine, with a shared high window bordering their bathroom. They'd woken me up the previous morning singing along to a blasting Lady Gaga's "Alejandro." On the morning of the 6th it was an acapella version of the already raunchy tune that normally goes "mírame bien que lo mío es rico"; mírame substituted with chúpame. Every evening until the ladies left, my room smelled of pot. I was glad to see they were enjoying themselves.

I walked up to the local chain restaurant Coco Baleadas, having discovered that Los Toneles, my favorite joint, used packaged flour tortillas (the horror!). On the way I was reminded of one of the several justifications being offered for the militarization of the supposedly "autonomous" UNAH (National Autonomous University of Honduras) that began in the pre-dawn hours the previous day. Union members were accused of having engaged in the telecom "gray traffic" that is so often in the Honduran news.

Across the street:

• Children against the coup
• Cops stop screwing the people

And a message that gets straight to the point:
Don't consume capitalist garbage.

That one is part of a local-consumption-against-imperialism thread of graffiti, which includes numerous tags of "eat baleadas" and "have a tortilla" outside fast-food restaurants (I've seen them on Dunkin Donuts and Pizza Hut).

Empire, murderer of children!

After breakfast wrapped in a delicious freshly-made flour tortilla I flagged down a colectivo to travel the short but trafficky distance downtown. I stepped into a conversation already underway between the talkative and jovial cab driver and his customers. The driver was talking about spousal abuse. "El hombre que le pega a una mujer no es hombre ¡es maricón!" he declared—"A man who hits a woman isn't a man, he's a fag!" He went on, and the guy next to me fully agreed, piping in at one point that yes, you couldn't hit a woman "porque es el sexo débil"—"because it's the weaker sex."

They moved on to stories, laughing now about various women they knew who had their men terrified, and who even hit them. "But where is she from?" the question would come. "¡Juticalpa!" or more generally, "¡Olancho!" the storyteller would answer in each case, and everyone would crack up. Women from the wild east of Honduras (Zelaya's home turf) are reputed to be more bravas, more outspoken, more dangerous than women from elsewhere, just like Olanchano men.

In interminable traffic just blocks from the center, where I had determined to grab a green tea before heading off to my meeting at Cafe Paradiso, I finally just got out of the cab. A funny thing in Honduras is that people will stay in the cab for a really really long time, sometimes hours even, rather than get out and walk a block or two, even if they walked much further to get to the cab in the first place. I was glad I got out, because I came upon this rather biblical-sounding quote (given the Castillian conjugation)":
"Men who abuse the sacred rights of the people for sordid and petty motives"

I passed a newspaper stand and bought all the day's papers (minus La Prensa, they were out of it), just to do a comparison of the UNAH military raid coverage. The Heraldo's blow-up cover for pasting on walls focused more on one of the paper's owners main enemies, Zelaya's foreign minister Patricia Rodas (illegally exiled by soldiers using Miguel Facussé's plane), whom they are now accusing of similar vacuous charges of embezzlement to the ones they're trying to pin on Mel.

And one interesting change since I last was in Tegucigalpa's center, a month and a half earlier: the cathedral seems to have run out of paint. Whereas very few downtown walls were free of social commentary, the cathedral always had a fresh coat of paint this summer, which had been applied and reapplied with great frequency. For whatever reason, the whitewashing (or in this case, pale yellow-washing, the color historians and archeologists under Darío Euraque's IHAH leadership discovered through meticulous analysis to have been the original pigment) was put on hold. Some of the messages to the Church:

• A year after the murder of Isis Obed Murillo [a murder predicted/threatened by the Cardinal] we demand JUSTICE
• Christ belongs to the people, not to the rich

• Father Guadalupe Carney [murdered revolutionary Liberation Theologist] Presente
• [Popular song] It's not enough to pray, [you need to do more] to achieve peace
• Christ belongs to the people
• The power is in the streets
• [faded/ineffectively painted over, to the left] Manuel Flores Lives

• [another poem/song] Christ for whose benefit?
• The church for whose benefit?
• God belongs to the people
• We need Father Tamayo
• [musical] Resistencia!
• Golpistas

• It's not enough to pray
• numerous signs of the beast, referring to the actual leaders of the Honduran Catholic church
• church that puts people to sleep [opiate of the masses]
• FERNO (student organization)
• Morazanist Reconstruction

This CEDOH book, published in 2000 (what would Julieta's role have been in it? She's not mentioned) caught my eye on the way to Café Paradiso. It would have been priceless to include in my book, but at least I have it now. It's a chidren's cartoon guide to Violence and Insecurity in Honduras. Brilliant.

Victor Meza and Leticia Salomon of CEDOH are, I think, excellent analysts, and I admire their work deeply. Noenetheless, I often find myself in disagreement with their stance, which has been fundamentally and consistently reformist (as in reform vs. refoundation of the nation). It's a slippery difference, at times hard to recognize, but nonetheless important. Take a look at how that plays out in the last few pages of this decade-old book:
Top cartoon:

It's necessary to understand more deeply the process of cleaning up of police. Without a real purge, the police will continue to be part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Chicken one: "They should strengthen the internal and external control mechanisms relating to police functions."
Chicken two: "Modernization should be accelerated and the police should be provided with adequate equipment for efficiency."
Sign: No more corrupt police

Here we can see the same discourse currently in vogue, used by everyone from Oscar Álvarez, to the cast and director of Unos Pocos Con Valor, to WOLA and beyond. It's the discourse behind the Merida Initiative and the one imported by big daddy Giuliani, of Giuliani Consultants, Inc. That is, that the problem with the police force is one of insufficient modernized labor force control, which occasionally allows criminal elements to "infiltrate" and more occasionally turns good cops bad. The argument that control mechanisms on police criminality should be strengthened presupposes that any exist in the first place. The call for "no more corrupt police" assumes this is a problem of individuals, and not a systemic, institutional problem. So we can either accept their view—an individualizing neoliberal analysis—or employ a (super-)structural and historical analysis, recognizing the Honduran police institution as an inherently political organization that has consistently and violently imposed the anti-democratic interests of the oligarchy and the State upon the vast majority of Hondurans, who themselves have had no say in the matter. The prescription one comes to based on these different interpretations will be radically different; giving more resources to an institution based on violence and the privation of democracy—an institution that along with the military is the principal human rights violator in Honduras—can never be hoped to ameliorate human rights violations.

Bottom box:

It is no less important to define the spaces for collaboration between the armed forces and the police, and to use the former only in areas where it is strictly necessary.
Furthermore, a thorough judicial reform must be implemented, to permit the impartial application of justice
This reform should include the depoliticization of the selection and decisions of magistrates and judges.

Certainly preventing police from acting like soldiers is a noble ideal; however, the statement begs the question: why the hell does Honduras have an army in the first place? The only use it has ever had is to repress the people of Honduras, and escort drug shipments for narcos in Facussé territory ("El Chapo" Guzmán lives in Honduras)—these, and a few really stupid feather-ruffles in the interests of large domestic and international corporations, that have taken lives of poor people from neighboring Central American countries.
And yes, it's an important point that there is nothing that even remotely approximates impartial application of justice in Honduras...but is that merely a lack of "checks and balances"/regulation or a more fundamental issue of the absence of real democracy?

...and the next page,

It is imperative that concrete measures must be laid out and implemented to reduce impunity, corruption and immunity, as an expression of the existence of a political will to face the crucial problem of insecurity.
Guy with yellow shirt: "We must review and modify the current penitentiary system, so that it combines carrying out one's punitive sentence...with the correct policy of rehabilitating criminals."
And on the other hand, the Ministry of Security must not become a Ministry of Police.
Sitting suited guy: "Security is an issue that requires cooperation, in which different State institutions are—or should be—involved...and these, in turn, should be tied to organized civil society."
With this integrated effort—taken seriously—it will be possible to achieve, in the middle-term, a secure environment we can trust in for the Honduran people.
Parrot: "As long as this doesn't happen, go forth with caution, readers my friends."

So here we start out with assumptions of verticality ("political will") and no proper definition of insecurity in political economic context. While certainly "rehabilitation" sounds better than punishment, what kind of society are they (and we) being (re-)habilitated into? One that places the blames for structural problems on individuals. Good solutions? AA, Church, labor discipline, etc. Bad solutions: more crime, drinking & drugs, identity crime (i.e., loitering, having a tattoo, living in a bad neighborhood, etc.). Migration kind of straddles the categories, since it's mostly encouraged by the State for the remittances it brings and the scapegoat it provides in allowing the State to place the blame on violence done to Hondurans solely on U.S. and Mexican actors; but it also highlights clearly the profound structural failure of Honduran system.

The call to keep the Ministry of Security from becoming a Ministry of Police is sadly prophetic of the Oscar Álvarez years. And the call to integrate the work of various state institutions with "organized civil society" leaves the latter woefully undefined. Civil society, rather that signifying organizations that work at acting democratically, that exercise their right to real opposition to abuses of power, implies a "partership" between corporate-funded NGOs and a corporate-appointed ("elected") State. Thus security—as it is defined here—and democracy—which has the potential to bring a very different and much more profound kind of security (e.g., distributive justice)—are diametrically opposed goals. And this is the version coming from the left!

So here's the Tribuna's front page. By the way, I took this series of crappy photos (including the above ones) on the table in Cafe Paradiso while waiting for my friends. No scanner this trip.
Top: More Hondurans in the "Valley of Death." This refers to the horrifying Tamaulipas story, which Lobo's government continues to milk for all it's worth in an effort to promote blind patriotism in the face of a common external enemy.
Middle: "UNAH in police custody! There is evidence of gray traffic in one of the buildings." Text below makes sure to clarify that the police were following legal orders.
Right-hand side: a mixture of death and disaster porn:

The inside story is one of the heroic brave police force ("Unos Pocos Con Valor") removing the criminal union leaders. I've stated this before- I'm no fan of the systemically corrupt, traditionally right-wing UNAH labor union. I have held them in somewhat higher regard than I hold the California prison guards' union. But militarizing the UNAH is a step that should never, never have been an option. If you're not Latin American, or haven't lived in a Latin American country, you might not have a sense of how seriously autonomy (no police/no military zones) is taken at national universities. It's taken very, very seriously. Think Kent State seriously. In private conversations with friends in the UNAH administration this summer, I saw signs that this was on its way. A friend I'll call Sintya told me time and again that, basically, the administration, in order to be autonomous from the oligarchy and golpista forces, had to be able to bring police in to control criminality within its own gates. Most of the administration including the rectora herself, despite being identified by most of the resistance as golpistas, self-identify as opposing the coup. Some have gone to great lengths, making personal sacrifices (perhaps misguided ones) to do so. Sintya was concerned because she wanted to sign the citizen declaration, but was afraid she'd get beaten up by the hunger strikers if she went near them to do so. I argued with her, noting the dangers I felt that bringing the police in represented, but was mostly just saddened by the analytical gulf that divided us. That theoretical gulf has now passed into fact, and will certainly bring more violence to the UNAH.

An insert that was included in all the newspapers came from the government. I'm including poor-quality images of the whole thing here (hopefully one day soon to be replaced with higher-quality scans), to show how the National Plan laid out by/for Pepe Lobo is being marketed to the infantilized population.

"What Are the Priorities of the 2010-2014 Government?" It asks, giving happy-thumbs-up checks to Country Vision 2010-2014; National Plan 2010-2014; and Budget of the Republic.

Let's remember—the dorky cartoon girl and bespectacled young man didactically instruct us—the country vision [which had no democratic input and was most likely written by State Department actors] has 4 objectives and 23 goals and will take 28 years.
The National Plan has 11 lines and 65 indices and lays out the plan to reach the Country Vision with Strategic Lines with their indices and Budget Lines.
The Government Plan, 2010-2014 is the starting point for a new focus on integrated development in Honduras, with strategic planning and participation of different sectors of government and society.
The 3 Pillars of Government 2010-2014
Education with Health: Conditions for improving human capital [does Marco Cáceres have his hands in here?] of Hondurans and opportunities for earnings for families that will allow them to live above the current levels of poverty
Citizen Security: It is fundamental to make sure that the population has a more solid awareness of its rights and responsibilities, strengthen a system of integrated effective and expedited justice, for example by living and developing oneself in secure surroundings with reduced levels of criminality.
Family Earnings: Consolidate Regional Development as a model for economic and social growth within a process of environmentally-sustainable development and an ever-decreasing environmental vulnerability.

...you know what? I don't have time to analyze these right now with everything else I have pending to write...and then there are those classes to prepare, and administrative tasks a-waiting. But I hope you get a sense of how dangerous this is. In a nutshell, is is a neoliberal plan for further privatizing Honduras, which starts from the assumption that human beings are "capital" and goes downhill from there. It replaces Zelaya's idea of citizen participation—however flawed that might have been—with an Orwellian bastardization of the "participation" concept, effectively removing any notion of democracy and relegating participation to the realm of free citizen labor in the interest of implementing a plan developed without any citizen input. So rather than analyze page by page, let's skim the rest and look at participation on the back cover of the insert...





...okay, here we are. Pink girl, hands in air in "how may I serve the master State" pose, asks rhetorically, "How can I PARTICIPATE?" Answers:

1. Promoting the regionalization of the territory
2. Planning and deciding locally through Regional Technical Units and Regional Development Counsels to achieve decentralization.
3. Creating and strengthening local, regional and national dialogue
4. Turning in accounting and being transparent [here in the plural]
5. Getting to know and participating in the elaboration and monitoring of the budget.

Hondurans are further instructed to "Cut this and paste it up in some public place in your community."

The Canal 8 wars, here favoring ultra-golpista oligarch Asfura:

...and a cartoon about the same, in which Pepe looks particularly rodent-like:

...and then this interesting threat/ad, taken out by the coup-funding group COHEP (Private Industry Council of Honduras), titled "COHEP demands a stop to the State intervention in activities that correspond to the private sector/free trade." Clearly, though the State is privatizing, it's not privatizing fast enough.

The same ad came out the same day with a slightly different format in El Heraldo:

And while we're on the topic of El Heraldo, let's take a look at their opinion page for the day:

The top article, apparently without irony, calls the Lobo administration's maneuvering to retain the government channel 8 for the government "Another harsh blow [also the word for coup] against Honduras." Where to even begin?

Underneath, here in greater detail, is a cartoon titled "Zelaya and His Dreams." "The International Community Pronounces:" it states, "let the boy keep his toy!" Zelaya's head rests on a pillow that is Honduras, and desperately grabs his "popular poll" Chávez teddy bear that still bears its "Chavísta Totalitarianism" tag. This one's so absurd I honestly don't know what to make of it, especially since the international community has been pretty much in support of Zelaya. It seems to me like a bad strategy of theirs to keep demonizing him, but perhaps they've got their hopes pegged on their Orwellian media monopoly.

...and this one takes the cake. Who needs subtlety?
THE HERO: The Police

For carrying out with efficiency and without any regrettable actions the legal order to evict the strikers who for several weeks have been blocking the normal operation of academic activities in UNAH.

THE VILLAIN: Agrarian struggles

Because they continue creating all sorts of problems in Honduras—uncertainty about legal security and even bloody conflicts—like the one that happened on Saturday when one person died and three others were wounded in El Progreso

Meanwhile, what's considered good news? Infantile patriotic fervor, building up to try to neutralize the massive show of resistance expected on Independence Day, September 15th:

More news: the State electrical agency has losses. Not-so-subtle message? Time to take it out of the hands of the people and turn it over to oligarchs or international investors so they can make massive profits by reaming the public.

And, oh no! Miguel Facussé doesn't feel safe in Honduras. Why, he doesn't discard the possibility that he might leave the country. He regrets that Lobo has not chosen to meet with him again, and warns that investor Carlos Slim "will have a terrible fright" when he comes to the country.

Misleadingly on the day before the general work stoppage, El Heraldo announces in bold that the general strike has been called off. In 20 days, it further notes, the audit of Inprema will be concluded.

El Heraldo's coverage of the UNAH eviction unsurprisingly mirrors that of La Tribuna's.

At that point I stopped taking pictures because my colleagues arrived. I will post some of the differences from El Tiempo shortly.

Our meeting only lasted about an hour and a half, but was very productive. It was refreshing to speak with José, the person whose analysis about Honduras I trust most implicitly, and with a new friend whose writings I have also admired. However, I left concerned and profoundly sad. The bloody repression carried out by the State is mirrored by ever-growing fears of infiltrators within the Frente, leading to increasingly hierarchical tendencies and purges. And the State repression is a dirty, dirty war against the resistance, in which family members and loved ones of mid-level resistance activists are being systematically killed in what in most cases are made to appear to be common crimes, but by their numbers represent what Durkheim would call a "social fact" of a pattern of targeted political assassinations. After our other friend left, José told me that the sibling of another mutual friend, a brilliant young intellectual, had just died a few days earlier following a week in a coma after being shot. I wasn't prepared for the news, as the last I'd heard from my friend in a short email was that their sibling was improving. José told me he himself was tired of fearing for his family's safety all the time, and that they were thinking of going abroad soon to escape the danger. He said that I should be very careful, after hearing about the strange phone call I received, and told me to not get too close to anyone; to not go out in public too often with any one friend; that anyone I was close with would be a target. I felt panic, guilt, terror, thinking about my friends. How dare I put them at risk? How dare the (U.S. funded and trained) Honduran military make me feel preemtively responsible for the violence it may commit, most likely masked as common crime? Shutting up is not an option. So do I push aside my friends and loved ones in Honduras to keep them safe? How the hell do people live with this terror, this impotence? How do they survive? I was only in town for five days. I was horribly shaken, and we both sat there, not having anything to say, feeling the unbearable weight of the danger all around us.

We hugged goodbye, and I promised to continue the struggle in Washington, in coordination with their work.

I then went to meet with Bertha Oliva, and was once again struck by her uncorruptability and unshakeable moral compass. We had a lot to talk about.

Walking back from COFADEH to the hotel, I saw this graffiti tag. "Popular and Non-Sexist Education" (signed by FER, Feminists in Resistance)

As I stood to cross the street to take this next picture, a young man walked up and brushed against me. "Mamacita," he whispered huskily. On this trip I learned an important lesson: I get more harrassed when I dress in skirts. I rolled my eyes, and chuckled once he was further down the street. What else is there to do? Get scared? ...Okay, I admit I was scared, but not because of some guy complimenting me in his own pathetic and violent way. I was scared at how seriously Bertha took my phone story when I told her, instructing me to bring more details the following day (which I failed to do), and telling me that mutual friends had been followed by a scary man after leaving the COFADEH office the other day, and had to run into a hotel to lose him. So I crossed the street and took a picture of this sign: To live without a price...

...and wondered what my life was worth. How hard would I struggle if it were directly threatened? Was I being followed right then? Walking into one of the most notorious crime zones after dark, but still being too cheap to take a bloody cab despite the panic into which I was whipping myself, I imagined a dozen ways I could get murdered, in great detail. I walked fast.

As always, nothing happened other than probably catcalls and more "mamacitas" issued out car windows- to be honest I never notice them unless they're super blatant like the guy who brushed past me, and in some perverse way I prefer mild sexual harassment to silence, when I know people are around. I know, or feel like I know, the everyday catcaller, and I don't particularly fear him.

Walking past this sign, I agreed to buy an agua de coco just so I could take a picture. The bottled agua de coco was surprisingly fresh and delicious, and priced accordingly high. The ad reads:
Dengue Kills [little mosquito drawing]
Coconut Water from Ceiba

Turns out coconut water is supposed to have some magical property that prevents dengue. They had fliers and posters all over. I made it back to the hotel alive, tried vainly to catch up on email, and then went to sleep exhausted.